1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a lane division line recognition apparatus for recognizing a shape of a division line, which is a boundary line on the surface of a road where a moving body, such as a vehicle, moves, by using an image captured by an imaging unit disposed on the moving body, a lane division line recognition method, a driving assist apparatus including the lane division line recognition apparatus, and a driving assist method including the lane division line recognition method.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional lane division line recognition apparatus recognizes the shape of the division line on a road surface where a moving body moves, using an imaging unit, such as a camera, disposed on the moving body. A conventional driving assist apparatus assists in the steering operation performed by a driver based on the recognition result of a lane division line recognition apparatus, and warns the driver if it is highly possible that the vehicle will deviate away from the division line.
Therefore in the driving assist apparatus, the recognition precision of the lane division line recognition apparatus, to recognize the shape of the division line on the road surface where the moving body moves, becomes important. Hereafter, the assist of the steering operation may be called lane keep assist (LKA) control, and the warning to the driver may be called land departure warning (LDW) control.
For the image captured by the imaging unit which captures an image ahead of the moving body, a technique to recognize the shape of the division line by linear approximation in an image area capturing the road surface near the moving body, and to recognize the division line by curve approximation in an image area capturing the road surface distant from the moving body, has been proposed to improve the precision in recognizing the shape of the division line (e.g. Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2014-26396).